Text-based Adventures of the Golovin AI Agent

The domain of text-based adventure games has been recently established as a new challenge of creating the agent that is both able to understand natural language, and acts intelligently in text-described environments. In this paper, we present our approach to tackle the problem. Our agent, named Golovin, takes advantage of the limited game domain. We use genre-related corpora (including fantasy books and decompiled games) to create language models suitable to this domain. Moreover, we embed mechanisms that allow us to specify, and separately handle, important tasks as fighting opponents, managing inventory, and navigating on the game map. We validated usefulness of these mechanisms, measuring agent's performance on the set of 50 interactive fiction games. Finally, we show that our agent plays on a level comparable to the winner of the last year Text-Based Adventure AI Competition

Deep learning for video game playing

In this article, we review recent Deep Learning advances in the context of how they have been applied to play different types of video games such as first-person shooters, arcade games, and real-time strategy games. We analyze the unique requirements that different game genres pose to a deep learning system and highlight important open challenges in the context of applying these machine learning methods to video games, such as general game playing, dealing with extremely large decision spaces and sparse rewards

CAPIR: Collaborative Action Planning with Intention Recognition

We apply decision theoretic techniques to construct non-player characters that are able to assist a human player in collaborative games. The method is based on solving Markov decision processes, which can be difficult when the game state is described by many variables. To scale to more complex games, the method allows decomposition of a game task into subtasks, each of which can be modelled by a Markov decision process. Intention recognition is used to infer the subtask that the human is currently performing, allowing the helper to assist the human in performing the correct task. Experiments show that the method can be effective, giving near-human level performance in helping a human in a collaborative game.Comment: 6 pages, accepted for presentation at AIIDE'1

Learning to Speak and Act in a Fantasy Text Adventure Game

We introduce a large scale crowdsourced text adventure game as a research platform for studying grounded dialogue. In it, agents can perceive, emote, and act whilst conducting dialogue with other agents. Models and humans can both act as characters within the game. We describe the results of training state-of-the-art generative and retrieval models in this setting. We show that in addition to using past dialogue, these models are able to effectively use the state of the underlying world to condition their predictions. In particular, we show that grounding on the details of the local environment, including location descriptions, and the objects (and their affordances) and characters (and their previous actions) present within it allows better predictions of agent behavior and dialogue. We analyze the ingredients necessary for successful grounding in this setting, and how each of these factors relate to agents that can talk and act successfully

Incrementar la presencia en entornos virtuales en primera persona a través de interfaces auditivas: un acercamiento analítico al sonido y la música adaptativos

Tesis de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Informática, leída el 25-11-2019The popularisation of virtual reality devices has brought with it an increased need of telepresence and player immersion in video games. This goals are often pursued through more realistic computer graphics and sound; however, invasive graphical user interfaces are still present in industry standard products for VR, even though previous research has advised against them in order to reach better results in immersion. Non-visual, multimodal communication channels are explored throughout this thesis as a means of reducing the amount of graphical elements needed in head-up displays while increasing telepresence. Thus, the main goals of this research are to find the optimal channels that allow for semantic communication without recurring to visual interfaces, while reducing the general number of extra-diegetic elements in a video game, and to develop a total of six software applications in order to validate the obtained knowledge in real-life scenarios. The central piece of software produced as a result of this process is called LitSens, and consists of an adaptive music generator which takes human emotions as inputs...La popularización de los dispositivos de realidad virtual ha traído consigo una mayor necesidad de presencia e inmersión para los jugadores de videojuegos. Habitualmentese intenta cumplir con dicha necesidad a través de gráficos y sonido por ordenador más realistas; no obstante, las interfaces gráficas de usuario muy invasivas aún son un estándar en la industria del videojuego de RV, incluso si se tiene en cuenta que varias investigaciones previas a la redacción de este texto recomiendan no utilizarlas para conseguir un resultado más inmersivo. A lo largo de esta tesis, varios canales de comunicación multimodales y no visuales son explorados con el fin de reducir la cantidad de elementos gráficos extradiegéticos necesarios en las capas de las interfaces gráficas de usuario destinadas a la representación de datos, todo ello mientras se logra un aumento de la sensación de presencia. Por tanto, los principales objetivos de esta investigación son encontrar los canales óptimos para efectuar comunicación semántica sin recurrir a interfaces visuales —a la vez que se reduce el número de elementos extradiegéticos en un videojuego— y desarrollar un total de seis aplicaciones con el objetivo de validar todo el conocimiento obtenido mediante prototipos similares a videojuegos comerciales. De todos ellos, el más importante es LitSens: un generador de música adaptativa que toma como entradas emociones humanas...Fac. de InformáticaTRUEunpu

Application of Neural Networks for Intelligent Video Game Character Artificial Intelligences

Much of today’s gaming culture pushes for increased realism and believability. While these movements have led to much more realistic graphics, we also need to keep in mind the behavior of artificial intelligence characters also in the game. Neural Networks are complicated data structures that have shown potential to learn and interpret complex behavior. This research analyzes the application of neural network as primary controllers for video game characters’ artificial intelligence. The paper considers the existing artificial intelligence techniques, and the existing uses of neural networks. It then describes a project in which a video game was created to serve as a case study in analyzing neural network controlled game characters. The paper discusses the design of the game where the player communicates with an artificial intelligence astronaut. The way that the player phrases the messages he sends to the astronaut helps determine whether the astronaut survives. The paper then analyzes the effectiveness of the astronaut character in exhibiting intelligent behavior. It then discusses potential future work in better demonstrating effective neural network controlled artificial intelligences